Existentialists abroad: West Indian students and racial identity in British universities

ABSTRACT This paper considers the role of racialization in the experiences of West Indians in British universities after the Second World War. In particular, Stuart Hall’s reflections highlighted the complexities of national, island-based, and imperial identities across the British empire. This chapter complicates notions of belonging and various identities available to Hall in his earlier years – Jamaican, West Indian, and British. The notion of racialized existentialism was central to students who considered the problematics of their existence through the racial lens. Hall’s argument for incomplete ‘West Indian-ness’ reflects the dynamic nature of identity. The thousands of West Indians arriving in Britain in the 1950s found themselves in a foreign land and negotiating in-between identities. Racialization shaped the intellectual and social consciousness of migrant students. This work investigates and analyses the fluidity of student identifications and argues that racialization in both the Caribbean colonies and the metropole was the determinant factor in West Indian/non-white self-conceptualizations.